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anarchy 117
Networking embraces a wide range of activities – cultural,
political and economic. In 1969, Kingsley Widmer identified
networking with the furtherance of rebellious life-styles, institutional
subversion and ‘refusing’: challenging the institutional order
through radical criticism, ‘the dissident way, the comic resistance,
the emphatic difference, the intransigent act’. 51 As John Clark argues,
networking has a ‘psychosocial’ dimension. The purpose of waging
this kind of struggle is to ‘combat domination’ and ‘self-consciously
seek to maintain ... personalistic human relationships’. 52
In the 1970s, Giovanni Baldelli described the process of
community networking as the mobilization of ethical capital. Today,
many new anarchists draw on the image of the rhizome to capture a
similar idea. Some anarchists like this idea because it emphasizes the
ecological thrust of their experiments. Thus, the Rhizome collective
in Texas is about bicycles, herbalism, edible landscaping, rain
catching and ‘sustainability community organizing’. For others, the
rhizome is a metaphor for the plurality of the networking process. A
debate in New Zealand about the renaming of an anarchist magazine
includes an exchange between an activist preferring the title
‘mycorhiza’ (inspired by the ‘symbiotic association of the mycelium
of a fungus with the roots of certain plants’) and another who
suggests rhizome. The clinching argument is that rhizome is ‘a very
good analogy for anarchism’ because ‘it is a non-hierarchical roots
system (i.e. anarchist grass roots ...) ... not just a term for something
“ecological”’. 53
Networks can be local, regional and even international. The
Anarchist Black Cross, set up to help victims of Franco’s oppression,
is a network of support groups which assists prisoners all over the
world to obtain basic human rights and fight against ‘prisons and
the poverty, racism and genocide that accompanies them’. Other
tangible examples of networking include the establishment of
housing and worker co-operatives, autonomous meeting centres –
the Reithalle in Bern is one example – and participation in LET
systems (local exchange currency systems). As Carol Ehrlich notes,
networking has limitless possibilities:
Developing alternative forms of organization means building selfhelp
clinics, instead of fights to get one radical on a hospital’s board
of directors; it means women’s video groups and newspapers,
instead of commercial television and newspapers; living collectives,
instead of isolated nuclear families; rape crisis centres; food co-ops;